August 01, 2011

Download Adobe’s new HTML5 animation tool

I joined Adobe specifically to build a Web-standards-based animation & interactivity app. Great thought, but we were a decade off base about when browsers would actually be ready to play ball.

That time has come, and the company is today releasing the first preview version of Adobe Edge, a fast, lightweight way to add life to your sites. Feature highlights in this release:

Create new compositions with Edge’s drawing and text tools.

Animate position, size, color, shape, rotation and more at the property level.

Bring motion to existing HTML files while preserving the integrity of CSS-based HTML layouts. (Edge stores all of its animation in a separate JavaScript file that cleanly distinguishes the original HTML from Edge’s animation code.)

Additionally, Adobe has launched The Expressive Web, a site showing off some of the cool stuff you can make modern browsers do, especially by using Adobe tools like Edge and Dreamweaver CS 5.5. Here’s a demo:

Lastly, I don’t want to get into any tedious “Flash vs. HTML5” blah-blah here, though I do see that angle still bubbling up on link-baiting sites. For that reason it’s worth noting that both Dreamweaver & GoLive were pushing Web animation starting in the 90’s, that Adobe championed SVG early on, and that it has been a main contributor helping to improve jQuery and lots of other HTML/JS/CSS tech. Point is, Adobe’s been driving both rich, animated HTML and Flash for 15 years, and the company will keep evolving both to address different customer needs.

Meanwhile, we hope you like what you see in Edge, and we’d be grateful for your feedback. (Oh, and if you create some cool stuff with it, please show off a link in the comments; thanks.)